Scrublands

by Chris Hammer

  But at the end of the night, as dawn’s light begins to assert itself through the thin curtains and the promise of a headache transmutes into throbbing reality, the phrase that his restless mind has distilled from an entire day of turmoil is a simple one: The police aren’t convinced. They’ve sent the diary for forensic analysis. Mandy Blonde. What has she done?

  He gets to the Oasis at seven, well before opening time, makes his way around to the back door and begins beating on it and keeps beating intermittently until finally, some five minutes later, he hears movement inside. Another minute or so and Mandy inches the door open. ‘You?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Fuck me, Martin, the baby’s sleeping.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  She looks pissed off, but she opens the door, lets him come through. ‘Jeez, you look like shit.’

  ‘I feel like shit. I drank whisky last night. It doesn’t agree with me.’

  ‘Funny that.’

  She’s wearing a thin silk robe over a t-shirt and boxer shorts. Her hair is tousled and her eyes are still blinking away the vestiges of sleep, but the magic wand of youth has blessed her, rendering her beautiful. He suddenly feels the weight of his fading looks: all the allure of a hessian sack. A hessian sack with halitosis.

  ‘Coffee?’ she asks.

  ‘You’re a life saver,’ he says.

  ‘And you’re a mess.’

  She puts on coffee, then joins him at the kitchen table. ‘So what’s so urgent that you come banging on a young girl’s door at the crack of dawn?’

  ‘You heard what happened to me?’

  ‘Getting sacked?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can’t see why it’s your fault. That policeman killed himself; you didn’t kill him. If people topped themselves every time a newspaper got something wrong, half the cabinet would have gone over the edge.’

  Martin can’t help smiling. When the whole world is gunning for you, it’s good to have someone on your side. Then he remembers Snouch’s ultimatum and he stops smiling.

  ‘Is that why you came here? To tell me you’ve been sacked? You need a shoulder to cry on?’

  ‘No. I came because I was worried about you.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Yes. Mandy, you told the police that Byron Swift was with you the night the backpackers were abducted.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you think they believe you?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Martin, and in uttering the words, he realises he’s lying. During the night, the words of the ASIO man have dripped their poison into his mind, irrigating the seeds of doubt. He wants to believe her, but he’s not sure that he does.

  ‘Good to know someone does,’ she says. ‘But no. I don’t think they believe me.’

  ‘Why not? Do you know?’

  ‘Because they’re lazy and they’re unimaginative. If they pin the murders on Byron, then it’s case closed. Homicidal priest takes out another couple of innocents. No need for an arrest, no need for a trial. Everyone goes home happy. Including some psychopath sitting out there rubbing his hands, knowing he’s gotten away with murdering those poor girls and whatever else he did to them first. And maybe planning his next little exploit.’

  ‘Mandy, tell me; I want to help. Is the diary authentic? You didn’t embellish it, did you?’

  She looks at him silently, her green eyes as cold and clear as icicles.

  ‘Was he really here that night, Mandy? All night? Were you?’

  Her response, when it comes, is barely a whisper, as dry and as withering as the winds of drought. ‘Get out, you arsehole. Get out and never come back.’

  RIVERSEND IS DESOLATE. THERE IS NO ONE ON THE STREETS, NOTHING MOVING. Martin checks his watch: twenty past seven. Already the relative cool of night is burning off, the prospect of heat nearly as oppressive as the coming reality. The sky has lost its dawn colours, washed away by the incremental ascendancy of the sun, leaving behind the bleached-out blue of summer. If there are clouds, Martin can’t see any.

  He sits on a bench in the shade of the shop awnings, challenging the town to respond to his existence, telling himself he will not move until he sees some confirmation of human habitation: a car driving past, a pedestrian, a kid on a bike. The town stares him down: not a stray dog, not a bird. Not the lizard who greeted him when he first arrived. Nothing. Finally, high up in the glowing blue dome, Martin spots the glinting silver of a speeding jet, vapour trail melting away behind it, heading west from Canberra or Sydney towards Adelaide or Perth. But the town remains impassive, conceding nothing.

  Martin considers what is left for him here in this sun-blasted vacuum. Not a lot. No job, no purpose. He’s successfully alienated Mandy Blonde, the one person he’d established any connection with. Now she’s banished him back out into the void. There’s Jack Goffing, the ASIO man keen to cultivate him, and Robbie Haus-Jones, a young man facing enough demons for the whole town, and Jamie Landers and Codger Harris, one young, the other old, both of them in mourning. There’s Fran Landers, who owes him for saving her son but would prefer him to disappear without a trace, and Harley Snouch, insistent that he help make things right with Mandy. Fat chance of that. He knows them, they know him, but ultimately they’re strangers. They may be allies or enemies, but none of them share his burdens. No. Not in this town, not in this life. He is without comrades, devoid of friends.

  He looks at his hands, resting limp and purposeless, one on the armrest of the bench, the other on the bench itself. Not agitated, not primed, but dormant, as if they’ve been switched off by some robotic remote, placed on standby awaiting further instructions. Has that been the big mistake in his life, the essential flaw in his character—that he’s always been a loner, slow to make friends, reluctant to make allies, resistant to commitment? There is Max, of course, a mentor and true ally, and perhaps a friend as well. Max, who saw his potential, made him his go-to man, first for out-of-town stories and later for foreign assignments. But what was it that Max saw? A good journo, a good writer, but also an independent unit, someone who didn’t want or need the normal support networks of humanity, a reporter at his happiest and his best when he was separated from those he knew, who could parachute into any situation, make acquaintances and recruit sources, and then leave without qualms when the story was done. He’d been perfect for the role. Or so Max had thought, and Martin had thought so too. Now he isn’t so sure.

  Finally, up on the highway, a truck thunders through, heading east from Bellington, ploughing onwards towards civilisation, not stopping, barely paying Riversend the courtesy of slowing down. Martin glimpses it as it passes through the T-junction at the top of Hay Road. Good enough; Martin stands. His head throbs and his stomach reminds him of last night’s excesses. He knows very little, but he knows he doesn’t want to be out in the open once the heat turns punitive. He thinks of water and aspirin at the general store, but it won’t be open yet. Instead, he crosses the road, making his way towards the wine saloon. Perhaps Snouch is in there, sleeping away his own hangover.

  But the wine saloon is lifeless: footprints in the dust, dried wine in the bottom of chipped tumblers, an empty bottle next to a crumpled paper bag. Snouch may have left five minutes ago or on Sunday night or at any time in between; there is no way of telling.

  Martin walks to the front of the saloon, to the boarded-up windows where the filtered light from the street penetrates the gloom. There’s a stool. He sits and peers out through a viewing crack, looking across the road towards the Oasis. How often did Snouch perch here, spying on his former fiancée and her daughter? What memories ran through his mind, what hopes did he harbour in his heart? Was there a frisson of excitement when at the end of the day she emerged to bring in the outside display bins? Did she ever look up, glance across the road, acknowledge her stalker in his lair? And what happened once she was back inside, the door closed for the night, the lights extinguished? Was it then that he returned to sit a
t one of the tables, finding comfort in his bottles and conversations with imaginary companions, explaining his motives to the dead veterans?

  Martin moves away from the shuttered window and sits himself at the table where he last spoke with Snouch. Martin considers Mandalay Blonde, locked away in the closed bookstore, as inaccessible to him now as her mother ever was to Snouch. She’s beautiful, painfully so; no questioning that. She’s intelligent too, quick and quirky and independent. And young and troubled, more troubled than she deserves to be. But then again, the troubled are always young; the old are simply pathetic. Grow old and the edges come off: the mind rationalises, the heart concedes, the soul surrenders. We all grow old and frail, inside as well as out. The twists of reaction become entrenched, character traits become permanent: the resentments, the denials, the rationalisations. We learn to live with it. It’s so much more troubling when we are young and honest. Maybe Katherine Blonde was onto something when she insisted her daughter lay her demons to rest before she turned thirty.

  Martin feels a pang of conscience, a creeping remorse, as he considers the woman shuttered away in the bookstore. Conceived either when her father raped her mother, or when her mother cheated on her fiancé. Growing up wearing the stigma of the rape allegation, bullied by the ignorance of locals, protected by a defiant mother conducting her own silent war. Finally escaping Riversend, but never really escaping it, frittering away her youth in Melbourne, only to be pulled back to the town by her mother’s illness. To be preyed upon by Byron Swift, with his looks and his charm and his selfish needs. Byron Swift, slipping between her sheets, between her legs, offering comfort and escape while taking exactly what he wanted. The murderer of Afghanistan, pretending to be someone he was not. Then getting shot, suiciding, and making poor Robbie Haus-Jones wear the guilt. And Mandy, impregnated and abandoned. Left all alone to raise an infant son, having nursed a dying mother. And yet she still loves Swift, despite knowing what he inflicted on her. Loves him well enough to defend him to the police a full year after he died, a pyrrhic display of loyalty if ever there was one. And then what? Him. Martin Scarsden, another thief in the night, a worthy candidate for membership of the wine saloon’s lonely company. And what has he given her? Some company, some grief. Some small parcel of companionship in the lonely nights of Riversend.

  Martin picks up one of the glasses, absent-mindedly moving it to his lips before realising what he’s doing. He puts the glass down, feeling vaguely foolish. But why? There are no witnesses here; there are no ghosts. He offers himself a smile, a twisted sardonic expression, lacking humour, holding sparse compassion. Byron fucking Swift. Homicidal priest, war criminal, sprayer of sperm among the lonely women of the Riverina. Fran Landers, Mandy Blonde, God knows how many down in Bellington, God knows how many before that. A backblocks Rasputin. Mandy knows he killed the five at the church. Why go to the police with her diary, trying to clear him of the murder of the backpackers? Did she see that as a more heinous crime? That the massacre at St James was some sort of psychotic explosion, conceived and executed in the moment, whereas the abduction, probable rape and murder of the backpackers was premeditated, sadistic and evil? What was she defending: the reputation of her dead lover, her own hesitant faith in him, or the legacy bequeathed to their son, so that one day, when he learnt the truth, he might think slightly better of his father than she thought of hers? Christ. Martin looks about. For an instant, despite his aching head, he wouldn’t mind spotting an unopened bottle in the dusty gloom.

  So what of her allegorical tale, that she’d fallen pregnant in a one-night stand in Melbourne? It seems obvious enough: she didn’t want to tell a journalist that she’d been the killer’s lover. She didn’t want that plastered all over the papers, not for herself and certainly not for their son. She wouldn’t want Liam growing up like herself…How had she phrased it? The progeny of scandal. But why talk at all? Because she wanted him to find out what she didn’t know: who was Byron Swift really? She’d done it deliberately, led him on, hoping he might uncover the past of the priest. What was she seeking? Some unknown vindication of Swift for impregnating her, abandoning her, shooting dead five people in cold blood, bequeathing their son shame and infamy?

  Martin thinks of Walker, his discovery that the priest was a man without a past, Martin’s article in the Sunday papers, Goffing’s revelation of Flynt’s war crime. Was that it? Mandy loved Byron Swift but didn’t know who it was she loved? She wanted to know his real identity, his story, for herself and her son? Well, Martin knows now. He knows who Swift was, knows his shameful past: that Swift was a war criminal. But can he tell her? And will she listen? And what of Harley Snouch, so confident his DNA test will exonerate him and prove her mother a vindictive liar? How can Martin even broach such possibilities? She would banish him forever.

  His stomach churns and his head pounds. He realises he’s losing her, that there is little chance of reconciliation, not after his early-morning accusations, not with the information he’s carrying around like unexploded bombs. Somewhere, sometime, he’ll publish Goffing’s story, tell the world that Swift was really the war criminal Julian Flynt, and she’ll never speak to him again. And he’ll be left with his own doubts about her. Goffing planted the seeds: is the diary genuine, or is it some new manipulation? Is it a fabrication, another allegorical tale? Martin sits in the wine saloon and ponders whether his life has been reduced to an absurdist game show: which does he choose, the money or the box, the story or the girl?

  The room brightens suddenly. A shaft of sunlight is carving its way into the saloon, lifting the gloom, sending motes dancing. The sun has risen above the row of stores on the other side of the street, high enough to flush Hay Road with sunshine, yet still low enough to penetrate below the saloon’s protective awning. Martin walks over to the cracks in the boarding, angling his point of view to avoid looking directly into the rising sun. But it’s no good: the Oasis is obliterated by the dawn’s antiseptic flaring. A flash of red, the sound of a car; Fran Landers returning from Bellington with milk and bread and swamp peas. And newspapers. There is life on Mars.

  But Fran is non-communicative, bustling around her store, restricting herself to the compulsory courtesies, so Martin buys the papers, some water, an iced-coffee-flavoured milk, a Bellington danish and some low-grade painkillers.

  He sits out front of the store on the bench, sipping the milk and grimacing at Tuesday’s papers. He’s gone from The Age, banished, all evidence of his existence erased, airbrushed away like a latter-day Trotsky. The story is on page three, by D’Arcy Defoe in Bellington, and listed at the bottom of the copy, like an afterthought: Additional reporting by Bethanie Glass. It’s a typical Defoe piece, beautifully crafted despite its brevity, sitting under the headline RIVER TOWN MOURNS LOST POLICEMAN. The story refers only obliquely to the circumstances of Herb Walker’s death and not at all to the connection with the backpacker murders; there is no mention of Martin Scarsden, Doug Thunkleton or anything else. Rather, it’s a eulogy to a fine man, a tough job and desperate times. Defoe has reported the story without reporting it at all; management will be pleased. The story has become a minefield for the paper, and with Defoe here, Fairfax will be in safe hands. He’s always admired that in his rival: Defoe never, ever loses perspective. Martin sighs. Time to get out of town.

  He’s finished the iced-coffee milk and is swallowing some tablets and water when he sees Robbie Haus-Jones and one of the Sydney homicide cops, Lucic, walking purposefully around the corner near the bank, no doubt coming from the police station. They cross the road and walk straight towards him, not talking. For a dread moment his heart accelerates: are they coming to arrest him? What for? They do indeed walk up to him, but not to arrest him.

  ‘Morning, Martin,’ says Robbie.

  Lucic looks at him with disdain, not even offering a nod of acknowledgement.

  ‘Morning, Robbie. What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing concerning you,’ says Lucic. He stays standing by Martin as Robbie
enters the store. A minute or two later Robbie emerges, accompanied by a concerned-looking Fran Landers.

  ‘Martin,’ she says, seeing him sitting there, ‘could you do me a favour? Keep an eye on the store? I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘Sure,’ says Martin, knowing he has nothing better to do.

  He watches the trio walk along the street, disappearing around the corner by the hotel, heading away from the police station, not towards it. He sits outside, waiting. A farmer pulls up in a battered ute, and Martin follows him into the store. The man buys a kilo of bacon, a loaf of white bread, two litres of milk and a pouch of tobacco. The till is locked, so Martin takes the man’s cash and sets it next to the register. The transaction is conducted in near silence, the man limiting himself to grunts, speaking only to communicate his preferred brand of tobacco. Martin follows him out of the store, watches him climb into his ute and drive back the way he came.

  Not long after, Martin sees the two policemen emerge from a store on the next block. Another surge of dread: the bookstore. Sure enough, as the policemen wait, Mandy joins them, and they cross the road, round the corner in front of the old council building and disappear from sight behind the bank, heading towards the police station. None of the three look at Martin.

  He’s still sitting there when Fran returns, pushing a stroller. Liam is sucking on a bottle without a care in the world.

  ‘Fran, what’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve taken Mandy in for questioning. I’m looking after Liam. Said they’d likely be a few hours.’

  ‘What are they questioning her over?’

  ‘I don’t know, Martin. They didn’t tell me.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Okay, I think. Resigned, maybe, as if she was expecting it.’

  ‘Right.’

  Martin isn’t sure what to do. Leaving town seems like the obvious choice, but how can he? He feels responsible for Mandy. He’s slept with her, he’s carried her alibi for Byron Swift to Walker, he’s returned her affection by more or less accusing her of complicity in murder. And now? Just leave town, wash his hands? Leave her to whatever trouble she finds herself in? A six o’clock execution by Doug Thunkleton, a beautifully written stiletto piece by D’Arcy Defoe, a scapegoat hung out to appease the public by Montifore and the cops?